Concealed-arms Laws Reduce Crime, Data Show

September 30, 1999

While I have always believed that an armed society begets a polite society, some anti-gun organizations complain when efforts are made to provide for legal carrying of firearms by selected law-abiding citizens.

A new study released by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms proves the opposite. The study compares states that have liberalized laws on carrying concealed weapons with those that place severe restrictions on concealed carry weapon permits.

The resulting figures show that states that have restrictive CCW laws have an average murder rate 99 percent higher than "shall issue" CCW states. Such statistics are reported numerically in incidents per 100,000 citizens; these percentages reflect a murder rate 13.1 per 100,000 in restrictive states vs. 6.6 in shall-issue states. Similar violent crimes follow the same pattern: The rate of robbery is 113 percent higher in restrictive states (258.2 per 100,000 vs. 121.3), and the rate of aggravated assault is 73 percent higher (487.8 per 100,000 vs. 282.6).

Common sense suggests that criminals do not like to become targets of abused citizens armed with a legal handgun. Hence the above statistics.

Passing laws and restrictions and bans on legal weapons that affect only law-abiding citizens has never made any sense to me, and now the figures are out that prove it.